For a little over a decade after the ignominious collapse of the Revolution of 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels worked as professional journalists. Writing from London for newspapers in the United States and, eventually, on the Continent, Marx continued while living in exile the analysis of the crisis of revolution that he first began in direct engagement with revolutionary events, most notably in The Class Struggles in France (1850) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). In what became a vast body of material, through this journalistic work Marx elaborated the critical concept of "bonapartism" first abumbrated in the latter book. Continuing his effort to learn the lesson of 1848, Marx concentrated on the crisis of modern society and the new mass democratic state that emerged, in the absence of the dictatorship of the proletariat, to meet that crisis.

This volume is the first to compile the journalistic works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels dealing with what they termed Bonapartism. The topics examined include the emergence of a new unionist capitalist politics in Britain, post-1848 Chartism, the East India Company, European nationalisms, and the Taiping Rebellion in China.